Vorkosigan

I ran across this on the net here
http://www.magma.ca/~fjduggan/sidic/95n1a2.htm

Tanakh itself contains elements of such interpretational "re readings" (e.g. Jer. 25:11-12; 29:10, interpreted in Dan. 9:2,24-27).

Peter Kirby

Hi,

Thanks for the link! I saw this note just as I was building my page on the Psalms for the Early Jewish Writings site.

Jeremiah 25
11 And this whole land shall become a waste, an astonishment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
12 And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, [that] I will visit on the king of Babylon and on that nation, saith Jehovah, their iniquity, and on the land of the Chaldeans, and I will make it perpetual desolations.

Jeremiah 29
10 For thus saith Jehovah: When seventy years shall be accomplished for Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in bringing you back to this place.

Daniel 9
2 in the first year of his reign, I Daniel understood by the books that the number of the years, whereof the word of Jehovah came to Jeremiah the prophet, for the accomplishment of the desolations of Jerusalem, was seventy years.

Daniel 9
24 Seventy weeks are apportioned out upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to close the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make expiation for iniquity, and to bring in the righteousness of the ages, and to seal the vision and prophet, and to anoint the holy of holies.
25 Know therefore and understand: From the going forth of the word to restore and to build Jerusalem unto Messiah, the Prince, are seven weeks, and sixty-two weeks. The street and the moat shall be built again, even in troublous times.
26 And after the sixty-two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, and shall have nothing; and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with an overflow, and unto the end, war, -- the desolations determined.
27 And he shall confirm a covenant with the many [for] one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and because of the protection of abominations [there shall be] a desolator, even until that the consumption and what is determined shall be poured out upon the desolate.

Louis F. Hartman writes: "This chapter consists, not of a symbolic vision, as in chs. 7-8, but of a revelation made directly by an angel. In answer to Daniel's prayer for a solution to the problem of why Jeremiah's prophecy of a restoration of Israel after 70 years has not been fulfilled, the angel Gabriel explains to him that the prophecy means 70 weeks of years--i.e., 7 times 70 years. Moreover, Gabriel divides these 490 years into three very unequal periods of 49, 434, and 7 years, respectively. Because the writer's calculations are only approximate and his historical references not always clear, there is still some difference of opinion in interpreting certain details in Gabriel's explanation. But practically all exegetes now agree that the 490 years terminate in the end of Antiochus IV Epiphanes' persecution; the once common opinion that saw in vv. 26-27 a reference to the death of Jesus Christ is no abandoned by almost all exegetes. If, as claimed by some, there are later insertions from the author of this chapter in chs. 7-8 and 10-12, this was the last chapter of the book to be written (shortly before the end of this persecution), and its author was probably the editor of the whole book. The Hebrew, although often obscure and of poor quality, is probably original and not a translation from Aramaic." (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 457)

W. Sibley Towner comments: "The angel Gabriel, the first angel in the Bible to be described as arriving by wings (v. 21), effortlessly expands Jeremiah's 70 years of captivity (Jer. 25:11-14) to 70 weeks of years or 70 x 7 = 490 years. The angel subdivides the 490 yeras to make this passage of hitsory--which otherwise would, from an apocalyptic point of view, have been essentially meaningless--into a significant periodization of time. The 7-week or 49-year period of v. 25 refers, quite accurately, to the Babylonian exile of the Jews (587-538 B.C.). Perhaps the 'anointed one' alluded to in v. 25 is Zerubbabel, the last legitimate descendant of the Davidic house (see Hag. 1:1-14; Zech. 6:9-14). Then, 62 weeks of Dan. 9:26 represent the 434 years of the Persian and Hellenistic periods. At the end of this period is a final week of 7 years. Verse 26 describes the beginning of that week with the cutting off of the last anointed one--a reference to Antiochus' deposition of the legitimate high priest Onias III in favor of his brother Jason in 175 B.C. (2 Macc. 4:8). The desolator of Dan. 9:27 is surely Antiochus, who, in Jewish eyes, 'destroyed the city and the sanctuary' by profaning them. The final three and a half years of history are marked by the dominance of 'the one who makes desolate,' but for that one the end comes on schedule at the end of the second half of the last week. Does this mean that the writer of chap. 9 knew about the cleansing of the Temple on Kislev 25, 164 B.C. (1 Macc. 4:52-58), an event which occurred just a little more than three years after its desolation on Kislev 15, 167? Does he know about Antiochus' death shortly after that event? Perhaps so. Perhaps this standard three-and-a-half-year sequence is only a visionary guess. History may have proved to be more complicated than the writer of Daniel 9 thought. But, for the writer, Daniel's posture is the right one, nonetheless. Penitence, courage, and trust in God's ability to complete the divine purpose of redemption are the themes of the great penitential prayer of Daniel 9 through which the prophet demonstrates how to think and speak while the periods of the ages roll around." (Harper's Bible Commentary, p. 704)

Samuel Sandmel writes: "How are these strange numbers to be interpreted? Possibly the 490 years begin in 586. The first segment may end in 516 with Joshua, the priest contemporary with Zerubbabel at the time of the return of the Jews from Babylonia. (See above, pp. 198ff.) The sixty-two weeks, or 434 years, may begin in 516, and terminate in 171, when Onias III was slain by Menelaus; but this is scarcely consistent with the arithmetic involved. The arithmetic is an insurmountable problem, especially since we do not know for sure what the author intends as a beginning date, nor can we be sure that his chronology agrees with that accepted by modern scholars. If we ignore the mathemetical difficulty, we may possibly explain the intent as follows: the last period of seven years could be the seven years from the death of Onias to the present 'favorable' time. During half of this period, an unhappy half, the Temple worship as to cease, as it did under Antiochus IV Epiphanes; at this time an 'abomination of desolation' would be in the Temple. The remainder of the time would be the interval of the successful Maccabean uprising." (The Hebrew Scriptures, pp. 234-235)

Louis F. Hartman writes: "seventy weeks: Or 'seventy Sabbatical periods.' The change from the 70 years of Jeremiah to 7 times 70 years is based not only on the fact that Israel's lack of complete repentance merited this sevenfold punishment (Lv 26:18), but also on 2 Chr 36:21, where Jeremiah's prophecy is connected with the Sabbatical years spoken of in Lv 26:34-35. 24. A brief summary of the whole period of the 490 years. If reckoned at its longest, from the time that Jeremiah first spoke his prophecy (605) to the end of Antiochus IV Epiphanes' persecution (164), this period would be only 441 years. But the writer, who no doubt knew little of the chronology of the early post-exilic period, would not be disturbed by this discrepancy between his symbolic numbers and the historical facts." (The Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 457)

James King West writes: "Chapter 9 contains a lengthy speculation on the meaning of Jeremiah's prophecy of a seventy-year exile (Jer. 25:11-12; 29:10). The seventy years are taken as 'seventy weeks of years' (490 years), which will conclude with the 'half week' (three and one half years) of Antiochus' desecration of the temple. Obviously any accurate application of the scheme is impossible, since 490 years reckoned from the beginning of the Exile extends well beyond the period of Antiochus. Whether the apocalypticist followed some confused dating system or whether he deliberately obscured his chronology is not apparent." (Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 423)

The NAB has this note on Daniel 9:2. "Seventy years: the prophet Jeremiah (25, 11; 29, 10) prophesied a Babylonian captivity of seventy years, a round number signifying the complete passing away of the existing generation. Jeremiah's prophecy was fulfilled in the capture of Babylon by Cyrus and the subsequent return of the Jews to Palestine. However, the author of Daniel, living during the persecution of Anciochus, sees the conditions of the exile still existing; therefore in his meditation he extends Jeremiah's number to seventy weeks of years (v 24), i.e., seven times seventy years, to characterize the Jewish victory over the Seleucids as the ultimate fulfillment of the prophecy."

If this thinking is correct, the passage in Daniel is midrashic activity of the type to be expected. The author of Daniel observes the recent history of the Maccabean period and attempts to understand these known events through the lens of scripture. The author of Daniel evidently does not invent a high priest or king in recent times from nothing but esoteric and tenuous recasting of the biblical text. Such a thing is unlikely on the face of it, for it would make more sense to try to interpret actual events from clues in scripture than to start to believe in fiction based on vapid analogies with existing stories. The reason that the interpretation of scripture is tendentious is the very fact that the author has to shoehorn reality into the scriptural boot.

This reminds me of a discussion with Layman about the Testimonium a while back. I thought (and still tend to think) that it is strange that Josephus would have started the passage of 18.3.3 in a way that practically denies the existence of the Testimonium and points simply to the previous outrage against the Jews. Layman suggested that Josephus was simply picking up a previous thread. In order to avoid a battle of dueling intuitions, I requested that Layman point out another example in Josephus' huge corpus of such a practice. I haven't seen such an example yet.

In this discussion, the thing that baffled me (and will tend to baffle until I see reason otherwise) is that ancient persons would have taken the Jewish scriptures and begin to believe in a Messiah that had been nailed to a cross, reversing death and blotting out the law. It seems to me that this type of belief about the Messiah would not have come about through Bible study and must have some antecedent knowledge on which the veneer of scriptural prediction can be painted. Because I do not know whether this intuition can be transferred to another person by its mere statement, I pose the question in terms of empirical fact--do we have another example of a similar thing in ancient history, of people who start to believe a certain important person or event had been real in recent history because of oddball rereading of scripture? So far I have seen examples of scripture being applied to things already in experience.

best,
Peter Kirby

PS- Did Daniel exist?

Sellin-Fohrer write: "It is dubious whether the Daniel of the book was actually a historical figure. His name and the names of his friends were certainly common in the fifth century (Ezra 8:2; Neh. 8:4; 10:3, 7, 24 [Eng. 10:2, 6, 23]), though they are found in other periods, too. Ezek. 14:14, 20 mentions a certain Daniel together with Noah and Job as a righteous man of early days, and Ezek. 28:3 compares him as a wise man with the king of Tyre. The book of Jubilees (4:20) mentions a Daniel as the uncle and father-in-law of Enoch, which, by the biblical genealogy, would make him the great-great-grandfather of Noah. Significantly, this form of the name corresponds to that found in the Ugaritic epic of Aqhat, from the middle of the second millennium, which tells of a King Danel who protected the rights of widows and orphans. Thus the figure of the wise and upright Daniel seems ultimately to be of Canaanite provenience. This is not out of harmony with the fact that the book named for him ascribes him to the sixth century; just as he is transferred to the time of Ezekiel, who mentions him, so likewise the ancient figure of Job in the OT book is transferred to a later time, albeit not precisely defined. In the case of Daniel, this is also in line with the general practice of apocalypticists, who employ for their writings names and figures from prehistory and early history without any intention of deceiving the readers as to their age. In most cases (though not in the case of Daniel, who is placed in the sixth century) this device is probably due to the assumption of a correspondence between events of the first and the last days: the representatives of the beginning, on account of their familiarity with that period, are called upon to announce the corresponding events of the end. In any case, the book of Daniel is pseudonymous." (Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 472)

Vorkosigan

In this discussion, the thing that baffled me (and will tend to baffle until I see reason otherwise) is that ancient persons would have taken the Jewish scriptures and begin to believe in a Messiah that had been nailed to a cross, reversing death and blotting out the law. It seems to me that this type of belief about the Messiah would not have come about through Bible study and must have some antecedent knowledge on which the veneer of scriptural prediction can be painted. Because I do not know whether this intuition can be transferred to another person by its mere statement, I pose the question in terms of empirical fact--do we have another example of a similar thing in ancient history, of people who start to believe a certain important person or event had been real in recent history because of oddball rereading of scripture? So far I have seen examples of scripture being applied to things already in experience.

This analysis seems to make sense.

Peter, in how many other places where we have relatively abundant remains was a scripture as tightly read as in ancient Judaism? Perhaps the hothouse is unique, so the flowers are special.

Vorkosigan

Peter Kirby

I think that this is a fairly peculiar trait of the Jewish religion--this is why they are called "people of the book." There are the Vedas in Hindu religion and the epics of Greek tradition, but I don't know of a religion--excepting its offspring Islam and Christianity--that made the books of scripture and their interpretation such a high priority. Polytheistic religions don't have a single revealer and a holy people in covenant with God; as such, they will have tales about the gods, but they aren't assembled into a Bible in the same way. (Of course, I must admit that I haven't devoted significant time to the study of polytheistic religions compared to the time I have spent on studying Judaism and Christianity.)

However, the hothouse in this case is not simply Judaism and her scriptures. If that were the case, one could expect more than one case of a pseudo-historical Messiah made up out scripture, but we do not find such to my knowledge. (This may be part of why many mythologues in the last century laid a heavy emphasis on discovering a "pre-Christian Joshua cult.")

For an examination on what the hothouse behind primitive Christianity may have been, try a look at this book on the Sec Web:

The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity

best,
Peter Kirby